The Europeans Aren’t the Only Ones Desperately Sad About America

“Desperate sadness” pretty well describes the mood that has predominated for me from the moment Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Most of the time, this percolates below the surface, mainly because I put my hardhat on every day and go to work to do what I can to rectify the situation. This usually staves of the sense of helplessness, but not always. These days, I have other things to be desperate and sad about, but it always comes back to the president. The condition I find my country in today is not some anomaly. It’s more like the physical manifestation of the spiritual rot that I’ve observed every day for almost four years. I can’t say it was inevitable because who knows when a novel virus will emerge? But it is the unavoidable consequence of putting a man like Trump in charge and of letting people like Mitch McConnell control the U.S. Senate. What we’re witnessing is merely the implicit becoming visible so that even foreigners can witness it.

As images of America’s overwhelmed hospital wards and snaking jobless lines have flickered across the world, people on the European side of the Atlantic are looking at the richest and most powerful nation in the world with disbelief.

“When people see these pictures of New York City they say, ‘How can this happen? How is this possible?’” said Henrik Enderlein, president of the Berlin-based Hertie School, a university focused on public policy. “We are all stunned. Look at the jobless lines. Twenty-two million,” he added.

“I feel a desperate sadness,” said Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of European history at Oxford University and a lifelong and ardent Atlanticist.

American football is an exceptional sport, admired if not always appreciated around the world. And the National Football League is a well-oiled machine and moneymaker. In this, the sport is a good analogy for the country as a whole. But if you take some out-of-shape sociopath off the street and ask him to quarterback the New York Jets, the New York Jets are not just going to do badly…they’re going to do exceptionally badly.

“America has not done badly, it has done exceptionally badly,” said Dominique Moïsi, a political scientist and senior adviser at the Paris-based Institut Montaigne.

This isn’t complicated, or it shouldn’t be. Electing Trump was the entire nation deciding to stop doing whatever it was doing and stop being whatever is was, and instead just start punching itself it in face all day, every day, in perpetuity, until somehow it ends.

If we were the Ancient Greeks, we would have long ago concluded that this decision had earned the wrath of the gods. Perhaps Trump killed his father and married his mother. Perhaps he fell in love with his own reflection, like Narcissus. Yet, somehow, when the time came to remove Trump from power, the country couldn’t manage to get the job done. His impeachment acquittal in the Senate was followed immediately by the pandemic, almost as if the gods were exasperated by our decision.

“There is not only no global leadership, there is no national and no federal leadership in the United States,” said Ricardo Hausmann, director of the Growth Lab at Harvard’s Center for International Development. “In some sense this is the failure of leadership of the U.S. in the U.S.”

The only thing holding me up now is the prospect of getting new leadership next January. If that doesn’t happen, all is lost.

About The Author

Martin Longman is the web editor of the Washington Monthly.
He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. Before joining the Monthly, Martin was a county coordinator for ACORN/Project Vote and a political consultant. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.

If Trump gets reelected in November, it will be because… a. we have been extremely lucky and for whatever reason we are not in a depression with millions of deaths behind us b. there’s been a coup of some kind or another (light version: the supreme court intervenes in some clever way to hand Trump a second term; heavy version: Trump allies with militias to initmidate voters and voting officials to suppress or just ignore the vote and the supreme court ignores challenges to an obviously illiegitimate election). It’s still early days. I am certain there will always be a… Read more »

The Big Reveal to me of the last 3-plus years is the way ruthless but expert propagandists can turn human beings into bots, melt them down into mindless self-righteous nincompoops, impervious to logic, facts, compassion, or fellow-feeling. George Lakoff’s writings on neuroplasticity suggest to me that we all, given the right repetitive exposure to outlandish lies, come to believe them partly as a result of our brains changing. The Right has been stunningly successful in the last decade in weaponizing those predilections, aided significantly by a feckless and supine media (and a predatory Fox News, itself a form of Corona… Read more »

It’s all an outgrowth of our original sin of slavery. Rectifying that took a horrible and bloody civil war. Then we patched up the republic with the sin of Jim Crow. When that finally came undone, it catalyzed a political realignment that ultimately took us to where we are now. Racism drives all of it.

Yes slavery was an original sin. Yet our constitution helps at many turns, like the electoral college and the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court decided the election in 2000 and the electoral college gave it all to Trump in 2016. Now how do we change it? Or must we forever curse the results.

Its like the old shell game. See if you can follow the bean. Of course the Dems would not remove Trump because they have a deal. Its like the Yalta napkin. As long as each party plays their role then they get along and share power. Everything is backwards, the opposite of what it claims to be in every way, an extrinsic fraud on the nation, (look that term up) because of GATS.